Here lately, anti-gunners have pushed laws at the state level that will allow them to go after gun companies, at least in theory, without running afoul of the Protection of Lawful Commerce of Arms Act. Much of it was predicated on an insurance company for Remington settling with the Sandy Hook families in a lawsuit that went after the company over the marketing of their products.
This has been seen as a viable line of attack since then, and anti-gunners continually denounce gun company advertisements as being nothing more than an effort to entice young, vulnerable boys into becoming mass killers or something.
After all, they tend to use a lot of military imagery in these ads. They talk about how various units use those particular guns, or how their firearms are used to defend liberty and all that. There's a lot of iconography at work in these ads, and the anti-gunners are trying to demonize them.
Yet what most non-gun people don't get is that there's a reason these companies advertise their products in this way.
It's because it works on regular gun owners.
See, I don't look at a gun advertisement and decide that I want a particular AR-15 or something because Delta Force used a similar gun when it yoinked Maduro out of bed, and I want to pretend to be a Tier 1 operator badass. I see that, and I consider that firearm because if it's reliable and effective enough for such an elite unit, then it's definitely effective and reliable enough for me to protect my family.
Glocks became the most popular handguns in the country, not because you could put a full-auto switch on it, but because it was the most popular firearm for law enforcement. People looked at what was on their local officers' hips and figured that if it was good enough for the police, it was good enough for them, too.
Not everyone, mind you. Some people are really interested in the nitty-gritty details. They want to see torture tests on these weapons to see the reliability for themselves. They want ballistics data from various barrel lengths. They consider numerous factors because it's kind of like their brand of autism or something.
But a lot of people who are into guns aren't that into guns. They see the ads, look at who is using what, consider the costs, and make their decisions.
The firearm industry knows this, so they market it to people in just that way.
They don't market an AR-15 as a hunting rifle because it's not. It's a rifle for a lot of other things, including sporting purposes, but it's not a hunting rifle unless you're varmint hunting, and even then, it's not the only rifle that will fit the bill. That's fine, because the Second Amendment isn't about hunting, but that also means showing a guy with an AR of some time in a dove field would be stupid.
And we know it. That wouldn't work. It wouldn't sell us a damn thing.
Show a Navy SEAL coming out of the water with a company's firearm, though, and then it's something to consider. That will grab our attention because what most of us have these guns for is to protect our families. The imagery of someone protecting our nation aligns closest to what we want out of these weapons.
Especially for us Gen Xers who grew up with movies like Red Dawn playing in the back of our minds. It's just a shame they never made a remake of that one. Nope, no remake at all. Chris Hemsworth? Nope. He was never in a Red Dawn remake.
Anyway, many of us grew up seeing gun ownership as more than just protecting our family, but also our nation. That's not changing because the threats have changed. That's not going to go away simply because the Soviet Union fell.
Again, that imagery works on us because that's playing in our minds.
What these anti-gun lawmakers and groups are trying to do isn't about reducing mass shootings. Mass killers have never been shown to even see gun industry marketing, much less be influenced by it.
No, they want to destroy the marketing that works in hopes that none of us will ever buy a gun again. It's just that simple. They want to hamstring the industry for refusing to bend the knee and stop selling to private individuals.
That's all it's about, and remember that the next time someone tries to claim it's about anything else.
Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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